Challenge Mode Armor Update, Lorewalker Story, Blue Posts, MMO Report

Priest Challenge Mode Armor Preview
Priests recently got a new set of Challenge Mode Armor! You can see the old set in our last recap.

Hunter Challenge Mode Armor Preview
Hunters recently got a new set of Challenge Mode Armor! You can see the old set in our last recap.

Challenge Mode Armor Sets Recap
These should be close to the final sets that we see upon release. All of the images now show the final color chosen for the set. You can see all of the previews and actual armor set items on the Challenge Mode Armor Sets page.

The Druid, Hunter, Mage, Monk, and Priest sets have new videos due to some changes that were made to the sets since the original preview videos.

Lorewalker Story: What is Worth Fighting For
In Mists of Pandaria there are several extra lore related achievements to go with the regular zone exploration achievements.

Once you have found all of the objects for an achievement, Lorewalker Cho will send you mail that asks you to meet him at the Seat of Knowledge. Once there he will narrate a small story that gives you some more information about Pandaria lore.

Confirmed that other abilities, like Light's Hammer is not affected by PVP Power -- but Eternal Flame is. Still would like a confirmation on whether this is a bug or not.
It sounds like a bug, but to be clear, PvP Power should do nothing for your healing in a dungeon or raid. When healing someone in a BG, Arena or in the outdoor world, PvP Power should increase your healing. The only exceptions are percent based heals, which does not include Eternal Flame or Light of Dawn. Eternal Flame should work almost exactly like Word of Glory, and I'm not sure what could account for a difference.

Hunter (Forums / Skills)I have been working on some modeling of my own for Hunters and I would like clarification something GC posted earlier. If I remember correctly, he stated that pets should always have 25% more Focus Regen than the Hunter due to scaling from the same effects and starting at 5 Fps rather than 4 Fps.

While my experience overall agrees with this, I will say that it is not completely accurate. Specifically, Focus Fire for the BM Hunter is a full 40% Haste, giving Focus Regen. It does not appear to affect the Pet however, particularly as the Pet's listed Swing speed goes back to its base value (2/1.1/(1+Hunter's Base Haste %age)). Is the design intention that Pets follow GC's earlier post, or should GC's earlier post be taken as a general design intent that specific abilities can break. I assume the latter, but I would ask the question.
Yeah, allow me to clarify. The pet inherits 125% of the hunter’s focus regen, which is based on ranged haste. It also inherits your melee haste, which increases its attack speed. So, odd as it may be, a buff like Focus Fire or Rapid Fire (yeah, need to correct the tooltip there) which gives ranged gaste only will increase the pet’s focus regen, but not its attack speed.

Paladin (Forums / Skills)Also, is it intended that Glyph of Protector of the Innocent (shouldn't it be Glyph of the Protector of the Innocent?) not work with Eternal Flame? Shouldn't it work with the initial heal at the very least?
Also a bug.

Prot paladin DPS relative to other tanks should be examined. Most changes to ret, and some changes to holy, affect Protection Paladins directly. EDIT: The bugfix to Eternal Flame make it somewhat unattractive to Protection. I'm a little concerned prot is going to gravitate towards Sacred Shield exclusively, especially because we have better ways to spend our Holy Power.
Prot paladin DPS is in a good place for us internally. The Ret nerfs didn't seem to drop Prot down below other tanks. Eternal Flame should feel like a slightly better Word of Glory for Prot, which is definitely a spell you do want to use. You should be able to figure out if the absorb over time from Sacred Shield provides as much defensive benefit as the hot from Eternal Flame.

Warlock (Forums / Skills)It's being reported that the .5 ticks from Malefic Grasp & Drain Soul are benefiting from Grimoire of Sacrifice. Is this intended or a bug?
Definitely intended. That’s how we managed to get Grimoire of Sacrifice strong enough for Affliction without making it some absurd number like +200% Malefic Grasp damage. It should be updating the tooltips of Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul to reflect that their extra triggered ticks deal 75% and 150% of normal damage, respectively.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Visual Overload for Melee During Raids
It's a very valid concern.

IIRC we just turned on the Emphasize my Spell Effects option on by default. There is probably still a way for mods to hook into it if it really offends you. But ultimately the difference is pretty subtle, probably too subtle.

Furthermore, the main emphasis on that option is chilling out impact effects on targets. At the time spells like Moonfire and Incinerate did very over the top visuals relative to how important it was to convey that information to the group. But much of what you're seeing now are also the effects a player has when they are casting or under the effect of a buff or the ground effects created by a lot of spells. They all make you look cool when solo, but the combined noise is just too much for large group encounters.

This has something I've been working on personally off and on with our technical director and artists. We need to revisit it and come up with some smarter solutions. I agree that we have an obligation to make this experience better.

We could certainly offer players options to tune effects up and down, and this is understandably a solution players often suggest, but we view options as the last resort. What I mean by that is that the game should play well without players having to go find the options.

Another feature we have been trying to get in forever (and are making progress, though probably not in time for 5.0 launch) is treating a target for purposes of spell impacts as the entire model and not just a point in space. Instead of all of your missiles converging on the same point, some could hit the dragon's wing or the ettin's heads. This would just be eye candy. It would have no effect on combat numbers.

If any of you want to contribute to fixing this, it would be helpful to list out specific class abilities that can be chilled out (either when other players are viewing them or sometimes even your own spell). Some visuals should be loud because they convey important information (say a priest's Sanctuary or a palafin's Divine Shield). Others are just loud.

Raid Tuning and Increased Item Drops
Just to touch briefly on the perceived 10 vs. 25 tuning: 10-player testing happened first. In many cases, in response to what we saw there, we increased the difficulty of the encounter overall, in both 10-player and 25-player mode. So now you're seeing 25-player versions that reflect buffs to mechanics that weren't in place when the 10-player versions were tested. (Edit: For a specific example, the current 10H damage of Force and Verve is precisely identical to the 25-Heroic numbers you saw today. We buffed the mechanic after 10H testing.)

The intent is for the difficulty to be comparable. While not directly relevant to difficulty or tuning, it may also be worth noting that 25-player bosses drop 6 items in both Normal and Heroic difficulty now, instead of just in Heroic, and that the 25-player versions will drop 3 set tokens, instead of the 2 seen in Dragon Soul.

Now, none of this is to say that our numbers aren't simply off the mark in many cases, but we're continuing to iterate on those numbers. For example, the melee damage dealt to tanks in the 25-player versions of many encounters was excessive, and we've been making adjustments there and will continue to do so. Specific feedback is always helpful.

After we finish with the remaining 25-player Heroic encounters that still need to be tested, we're going to go back and do a second testing pass on a number of encounters, both in 10- and 25-player mode, and in Normal and Heroic difficulty, where we feel that more data and feedback would be of use. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Minimum Item Level for First MoP Dungeons
You need an average item level of at least 358 to queue for the Normal mode of Temple of the Jade Serpent. In general, questing through a given zone should amply provide the item level you need to queue for that zone's dungeon. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

PvP Feedback
Totally agree with the second point. If damage is too high, then there is no strategy other than blow all your cooldowns and try and kill someone in 10 sec. If healing is too high, then nobody dies and you have an endless stalemate. The challenge is to keep tuning somewhere in the middle where a well orchestrated kill can overcome the healer but folks aren't just dying faster than anyone can respond. Our hope is that the addition of PvP Power and its benefit on healing will keep healing in PvP scaling with damage being done and mitigated.

For the first question, this was the result of a fix to make Charge and similar abilities harder to cheese. Before, Charge always took you to the place where the target was when you began the Charge, so that even by jumping or dismounting you could place your character away from the charger. The warrior (or whoever else) would have spent the Charge, but not actually benefited from it because you were clever enough to hit your space bar. That felt cheap and frustrating. We implemented a fix so that instead of targeting a position in the world, Charge always hits its target. Rather than freezing you in midair (which would look weird) or teleporting the charger to wherever the target ends up (which would look weird, but more importantly might give charger an exploit to move longer distances than intended) we rubber-band the target back to their location.

You have to think about this from the point of view of a server-client game. For the charger, he executes the Charge on his client, then the server acknowledges it and resolves the command. The problem is meanwhile on your client, you have Disengaged. In order to feel responsive, that happens immediately. However, a very short time later the server says "No, wait a sec. You were charged. That means you can't have Disengaged." And it moves you back in time a moment. (If it's not obvious, we have to let the server be the final arbiter of combat because clients can be hacked or go offline or whatever else.)

We understand the frustration though and it's possible we could try to make a distinction between long cooldown abilities like Disengage jumps and simply hitting the space bar. We would still likely have to teleport the charger to your final destination or retroactively cancel the charge, both of which are also going to feel weird. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warrior (Forums / Skills)Potential Sudden Death Changes
There are so many suggestions here on the last couple pages that it would be hard to comment on them all. One that caught my eye is changing Sudden Death to white attacks only and increasing the percent chance. I can't think of a downside to that one and it would help improve the value of haste. We'll discuss it. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Paladin (Forums / Skills)Recent Retribution Changes FeedbackSpecifically, why take paladins of all classes and turn them into bursty glass cannons? We're heavily armored champions of the light, capable of healing ourselves and crafting nigh-impenetrable barriers out of our raw will, and yet our mechanical strengths and weaknesses mostly encourage us to sort of hide behind a rock two-thirds of the time waiting for our cooldowns to tick away in the hopes that once they do we can murder the crap out of someone before they have a chance to fight back.
I think glass cannon is debatable for a class with as many cooldowns as paladins. Warriors and rogues can be bursty as well. Anyone can be bursty who lines up a lot of cooldowns and has a full bar of resources, and warriors with Heroic Strike off the GCD and rogues with a 1 sec GCD are just two classes good at delivering on that.

If your question was more about why paladins aren't designed to be high defense, low offense, we just found that it wasn't a very fun model for our game (and tanks rather than specific classes sort of fill it already).

That's why we don't understand why our DPS CDs keep getting buffed while consistent damage goes down when the developers have to know at this point how utterly Ret Paladins can be countered by CC.
Is there a specific CD buff you're referring to? We tried to take damage down across the board, which will include attacks both during CDs like AW and without. If you're referring to buffing Holy Avenger, we just needed to that so that mathematically it was a competitive choice.

There are also a lot of requests in here to increase the damage of Hammer of Wrath, which would still just increase bursts during short windows, even if you only consider execute range and not wings.

HoW does so little damage its not even worth using in the rotation when wings are up.
I would be surprised if that was the case. How about this though: if we find that we need to increase Ret's damage, we'll definitely look at HoW as an avenue for that.

I've enjoyed playing Ret in the beta, not because it's been "OP" but because it feels more fluid. This is a sharp contrast to prot which feels much clunkier with our main attacks going to haste scaling rather than a fixed 3-second cooldown.
Can you explain why Sanctity of Battle works for Ret but not Prot?

I feel all of this retribution "Balancing" has been leaking into Protection Dps specifically threat generation but they're being relatively neglected because there are fewer Protection Paladins than Ret and even fewer of us that have a voice.
I recently mentioned that was a possibility since we had been focusing on Ret, but there were plenty of knobs to bring Prot DPS back up. Since then we tested it and found that Prot's DPS was pretty much exactly where it should be. There were situations, such as AE, where warrior DPS was much too high, but they should all be closer next patch.

I'm also noticing that Glyph of Inquisition is increasing my Crit by 10%, which isn't stated in the Glyph itself but is in the character screen and buff duration.
Inquisition itself increases crit now. Is the glyph doing it as well? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

New priest challenge mode armor reminds me of Final Fantasy. It looks amazing, but I don't see it looking too good on a select few other races (mtroll, mtauren, mdrainei).

Edit: I wonder if the designers even consider if the players will do anything other than stand still. I imagine casting animations, even running and being mounted is going to cause the shoulders to clip the head especially in disproportionate races.

What the heck! The old hunter challenge mode armor was awesome looking! This crap is /hideous/! Stupid, stupid Blizzard.

agreed the gear looked amazing... now its replaced with what i think is the pvp gear?

You're a fine example of how gamer communities have become infested with endlessly whining and bitching, arrogant, opinionated, unreasonable, all the way immature, completely delusional, tendentially psychotic, insulting individuals one really doesn't want to be linked with. And playing with you guys is certainly no fun at all. I don't know where this kind of folks spawns from. Must be a nest somewhere ...

yeah Blizzard flipped around the hunter MoP pvp tier 1 and the Challenge armor sadly, that amazing set they showed us so long ago is still in game though to get it you need to PVP

so they switched the pvp set for on that looks pve and the pve set for one that looks pvp thats odd

You're a fine example of how gamer communities have become infested with endlessly whining and bitching, arrogant, opinionated, unreasonable, all the way immature, completely delusional, tendentially psychotic, insulting individuals one really doesn't want to be linked with. And playing with you guys is certainly no fun at all. I don't know where this kind of folks spawns from. Must be a nest somewhere ...

Yeah I'm sorry, shoulders are way too big, it even surpasses warrior T7.5. If possible can you make a video or a screen by screen image of what casting/attacking looks like just to see the ridiculous amount of clipping I expect would be happening. Just for the lols Chaud I would love you.

BUUUUHHH!!! NEW CHALLENGE PRIEST SET BUUUUHHH!!! i want be the pope, the pope was better

The previous priest challenge set is now the T14 set, while the T14 set is the PvP set. (Which is dumb. The T14 set is named Guardian Serpent - the now PvP Set is the only one that remotely looks like a serpent/dragon)

"You need an average item level of at least 358 to queue for the Normal mode of Temple of the Jade Serpent."

358? Thats pretty low...

It is half a tier higher than what is required to the do the current heroics. Basically most players, if you want, will be able to level through dungeons, or at least queue for them while questing. I know I am going to tank Jade Sperpent first thing just to get the quest rewards, and hopefully a drop. Takes less than 30 minutes and will mean I can then DE more quest rewards while questing.

What I have been seeing, if you have an ilevel of 390ish, Jade Serpent is actually easier than the current heroics.